Weekend Projects Gone Awry, Part 1

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time at home, which has produced an odd side effect. It seems the more time I am left alone, the more I get stuck on ideas without real merit. Generally speaking, these are passing thoughts at best, but sometimes one takes root and seems dedicated to obstructing real productive thought.

In past years, I’ve simply bided my time until the thought eventually passed. The more recent thoughts, however, don’t seem to be following the pattern. Whether because of changes in my personal life, or the ongoing process of maturing, I find myself having to invent new methods for clearing my mind. And so we find ourselves here, dear reader, where I will attempt to quickly bring these concepts to life and subject you to the process.

The Idea: SlimSocial

At heart I am most comfortable playing the role of an introvert. As such, the world of social networking is irksome to say the least. Don’t get me wrong, I have met many great friends thanks to the internet, but I also think they talk too much at times. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to “SlimSocial,” my solution to social-overload on the internet.

Executing

Instead of allowing everyone to talk so much, I wanted to create a simple network that limited the number of posts someone could make per day. Initially, I’d envisioned limiting everyone to one post per day, and most of my prototype work has been done with that in mind. If I were to put more work into the system, it would be more appropriate to generate a system on top of the “likes” and “dislikes” a person accumulates.

Speaking of likes/dislikes, since I’m robbing people of the ability to flood the network with their idle musings, I certainly can’t take away their ability to show support or disdain for their fellow network members. Still, I couldn’t quite re-use the terminology of sites like Facebook, Reddit, etc. I spent a while racking my brain on what to call this feature, and eventually got a helping hand from Jordan. He took the “Slim” in the title a bit more anatomically, and suggested the system use weight loss or gain to represent likes and dislikes, respectively. Imagining the confusion this could cause, I quickly jumped on the idea and the chance to further solidify the network’s uselessness.

Tech Notes

There aren’t really any interesting tech notes for this project, except to say that there aren’t any interesting tech notes. What I mean by that is that I decided to forego utilizing any frameworks outside of jQuery and Boostrap on the UI. This was the first PHP project I’ve done in years without my framework (N2F) save for a game to keep tallies of annoying phrases on phone calls I did for a friend over the course of 2 hours. The whole experience was…enlightening. I can now say I know what parts of my framework are the crucial ones that really do save me lots of work. Beyond that, I might say I got to practice a little more with build/release automation in TeamCity, but that was less a goal for the project than it was a result of my server outage.

Conclusion & Reveal

I had hoped to make the prototype for this project over the course of a weekend. The mockup took about an hour after I found a template, but the remainder of the work was broken up due to said server outage, the holidays, and of course my day job. I’d estimate I spent 4 full days of work (32 hours) on the project to get it to where it sits today. The prototype is essentially complete, and though there is obviously more work to do, it is time to move on…or so I hope.